I suppose I am confused by what you mean with, "writing bash scripts".

Like, are you _literally_ scripting in the value of an item or are you just equating that they are similar?

Literal being:

get_number_of_lines:

  command: >

     #!/bin/bash

     wc -l

Something like this: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/tas...

Invariably, ppl will write inline scripts instead of actual scripts in their own files. There are also some SDKs for most of these operations that would let you do it in code but they are not always 100% the same as the CLI, some options are different, etc.

Yes, this is how Gitlab pipelines work. It's actually easier to just inline the script most of the time than have a bucket of misc scripts lying around. Especially since you have hooks like before/after_script which would be really awkward to externalize.